Growing up in a Spanish-speaking household in the Little Mexico community of Dallas, with a dad who hadn’t gotten past the third grade and a mom who went to school only for two weeks, Ray Villareal didn’t picture himself growing up to write popular English books aimed at middle school boys. But looking back, he says, writing was in his blood.

His dad, despite his lack of formal education, had a passion for poetry. He used to send Ray and his brothers door to door to sell his poems for 10 cents apiece.

“I realize now my influence came from my father,” Villareal says. “My father had terrible penmanship and was a terrible speller. He bought himself an old typewriter, typed … [the poems] on scraps of paper and taped them to the pages of a ledger to make his own book.”

It’s the story of Rawly Sanchez, one of the least popular kids in school until one night when he acts decisively at the scene of a car accident and rescues a famous model. When he finds himself suddenly sought after, particularly by a girl he’s been mooning about all year, he has to figure out who his real friends are.

Villareal knows his subject well. Don’t Call Me Hero takes place in Dallas, where Villareal still lives, and is rich in local references — from the Dallas Comic Con, where Rawly is eager to meet his comic-book idol Johnny Romita Jr., to the Texas Theatre where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured to The Dallas Morning News, which is where everyone reads the story about Rawly’s heroic act.

The characters are drawn from his childhood, with Villareal identifying with the hapless, comic-book-loving Rawly, and from the students he observed while teaching in the Dallas Independent School District for 30 years. Trying to get Latino students in the bilingual programs excited about reading gave him the idea for his first book, My Father, the Angel of Death, published in 2006. Inspired by a student Villareal observed at school, it’s about a scrawny boy whose big, overpoweringly strong father is a professional wrestler.

“My sixth-graders didn’t like to read, but they were always talking about wrestling,” says Villareal. “From the very beginning I wanted to write books that feature Latino characters because there were so few books out there for them when I started teaching.

“Latino writers tend to write stories about impoverished Latino kids who struggle with the myriad problems living in poverty in a barrio bring. I think those stories need to be told, and there is an audience for those kinds of books, but I wanted to take my characters out of that environment and place them in middle-/upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

“I wanted to give them a Latin version of Louis Sachar and Judy Blume and put them in situations that would have broader appeal for a wider range of readers.”

Villareal knows what a difference reading can make in a child’s life. It was a turning point for him when he went to the swimming pool at Lee Park at age 10 and, finding it closed, explored the nearby Oak Lawn Branch Library in Dallas instead. The librarian welcomed him, took him to the children’s section and got him a library card. He’s been hooked ever since.

He became the first person in his family to graduate from college, earning a degree from Southern Methodist University in 1981. He married a fellow teacher, Sylvia, and raised two children. His daughter, Ana, 22, who is studying to be a pastry chef, is the first editor on his books. His son, Mateo, 30, a police officer, has been encouraging him to wind up the sequel to Mateo’s favorite, My Father, the Angel of Death.

Villareal, who retired from teaching to write full time, says he has been especially glad to plunge back into that world with the sequel he’s titled Body Slammed!, because it’s gives him a chance to pay tribute to his father again.

“In My Father, the Angel of Death, I use one of his poems,” Villareal says. “At a turning point in the story, the father sings a song to his wife, which is a love poem that my dad wrote for my mother when they were dating. Now my readers all across the country are reading his poems. That makes me feel great.”

He’s still happy about selling his dad’s poems, he says — just now at bookstores instead of door to door.

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About Nancy Churnin

Nancy covers theater and children's entertainment for The Dallas Morning News. A former theater critic and columnist for the San Diego Edition of the Los Angeles Times, she won two San Diego-area press awards in back-to-back years for Best Arts Feature and has filed theater stories from Moscow and New York. She is a member of the SCBWI, Writer's Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild dating back to her work on the television show Happy Days.

Hometown: New York City

Education: Nancy has a B.S. cum laude from Harvard University, where she wrote for the Harvard Independent, and an M.S. from Columbia University's Columbia School of Journalism, where she was a Jacqueline Radin Scholar.